‘My mother’s neurosurgeon loved Berghain’: producer Sofia Kourtesis on love, loss and her debut album

The Peruvian artist left her country for Berlin to be comfortable in her sexuality – then family illness took her back. She’s poured the turmoil into one of the year’s best dance albums

Of all the places to take your mother’s world-renowned neurosurgeon, Berlin superclub Berghain might not be top of most people’s lists. But, the Peruvian producer Sofia Kourtesis reasoned, she had seen so much of the Berlin doctor’s workplace, “I told him: ‘I want to show you a little of Sofia’s world.’” They went for Peruvian food before hitting the club this May. “He really loved it,” she says. “We bonded in a very beautiful way.”

The unlikely duo met when Kourtesis was seeking medical advice for her mother, who had been diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and whose health was deteriorating rapidly. She needed life-saving surgery that very few specialists could offer. Kourtesis, who lives in Berlin, read about Peter Vajkoczy and was determined to reach him, despite knowing that obtaining an appointment would be near-impossible. She posted an Instagram story saying: “If anyone can put me in touch with Peter Vajkoczy, I’ll dedicate a song to him. I just need two minutes to talk to him.” Vajkoczy appreciated her cheeky request and agreed to meet.

Continue reading...
by Dhruva Balram via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We put his face back together again’: the groundbreaking show bringing Ryuichi Sakamoto back to life

Shortly before his death this year, the iconic Japanese composer worked on mixed-reality concert, Kagami – featuring new music, 48 cameras and magic glasses for the audience

Todd Eckert is explaining, in circuitous yet joyous fashion, how he first fell in love with the work of the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s a conversation that meanders through Eckert’s teenage visit to Preston, his years as a punk rock kid in Houston, Texas and his time producing the 2007 Joy Division film Control – yet ultimately always returns to Sakamoto’s astonishing songcraft.

“Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence was not the first thing of his that I had heard – it may have been Left Handed Dream – but it was the first thing that I totally understood,” he says, sitting outside a Brooklyn cafe in bright yellow trainers.

Continue reading...
by Laura Barton via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sofia Kourtesis: Madres review – a hymn to dance music’s healing powers

(Ninja Tune)
Dedicated to her parents, the Berlin-based Peruvian’s joyous debut album is a masterclass in emotive electronic production

Family is a constant inspiration for Peruvian producer and DJ Sofia Kourtesis. Her breakthrough 2021 single, La Perla, was dedicated to her late father, merging a gorgeously undulating melody with voice recordings, evoking a yearning for home from her new base in Berlin. Following a string of remixes for Caroline Polachek and Jungle, Kourtesis now delivers her debut album. Dedicated not only to her mother but also to the neurosurgeon who performed life-saving cancer surgery on her, Madres’s 10 tracks are a masterclass in emotive electronic production.

The opening title number sets the record’s joyous tone. With Kourtesis’s soft falsetto reverberating over a modular synth, it soars spaciously, spiralling outwards. This imaginative, cinematic quality is also a feature of the dancefloor-focused tracks such as the thumping Si Te Portas Bonito and bass-fuelled highlight Funkhaus. The ambient vocal layering in Moving Houses is an unconvincing, sketch-like interlude, but overall Madres is an uplifting experience. It peaks with How Music Makes You Feel Better, in which a techno-infused beat anchors a euphoric, arena-sized synth line, expressing Kourtesis’s belief in music’s capacity to heal the spirit.

Continue reading...
by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Guide #110: The outsized influence of PC Music

AG Cook’s oddball imprint founded in 2013 has had a seismic impact on the charts. Now, after ten years, it can wind down in victory

• Don’t get the Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up to get the full article here

There are woefully few grand narratives in pop music these days. Over the past 20 years, there’s been nothing even remotely similar to the thrilling scenes that defined late 20th-century Britain: punk, rave, goth, two-tone, Madchester, New Romantic, garage – genres that send hearts hurtling back to a certain time and place. Even grime – whose mid-2010s popularity explosion re-energised British music, fashion and politics – was essentially a reprise of the sound that blazed a trail through 2002. In fact, when surveying the pop landscape today, it seems the closest thing we have to an overarching ‘moment’ is still The New Boring, a term coined by writer Peter Robinson in 2011 to describe the beige, ballad-heavy wave of tediously inoffensive music – your Ed Sheerans, Adeles, Coldplays – that was smothering the zeitgeist at the time. By many metrics, it still is.

If this sorry state of affairs has you primed to grieve the end of pop culture, fear not – because it’s only half the story. A genuinely novel musical subculture actually has been unfurling over the past decade: it may not have revolutionised British nightlife, but it has steadily worked to reinvent pop music in its own image.

Continue reading...
by Rachel Aroesti via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Chemical Brothers review – mesmerising barrage of thunder and lighting

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Sound is turned into spectacle in a theatrical two-hour performance mixing bold visuals and rapturous tunes into meticulously choreographed awe

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are indistinct within a looming ring of keyboards, drum machines, laptops and mixers. It isn’t clear, through darkness and dry ice, what precisely they are doing to conjure the mesmeric thunder of a Chemical Brothers live show. But they are busy as druids in a stone circle, working magic among the machines.

Nothing in this two-hour performance suggests the duo – now in their early 50s – are trading on past glories. Yes, the bassline of Block Rockin’ Beats is cheered like a returning hero, but the highlights actually come with less familiar songs, less straightforward moods. Wide Open is equal parts euphoric and elegiac. Goodbye is acid gospel in which bass pounds the chest – EDM as CPR – while a sampled vocal makes the heart ache.

Continue reading...
by Peter Ross via Electronic music | The Guardian

Overmono review – sparkling shards of rave culture tear up the dancefloor

Roundhouse, London
The Russell brothers bring the party to a damp weeknight, using ecstatic production and crowd-pleasing samples to inspire mass dancing even from those seated

Although pounding kick drums, speedy hi-hats, crawling basslines, and looped vocal samples are often associated with DJ sets in late-night club spaces, Overmono are one of the growing number of dance music acts showing that the genre can thrive in a large-scale gig environment and not lose its gritty character. London’s Roundhouse provides an alternative type of big-room experience to what tech-house-loving-bros might be used to, yet the concave roof collects the sound, engulfs listeners, and facilitates a Wednesday evening dance.

The duo of brothers Tom and Ed Russell, AKA Truss and Tessela, get the energy high from the off with their heavy Joy Orbison and Kwengface collaboration Freedom 2, before heading into their more synth-heavy, ecstatic cuts. Big tracks like Gunk and BMW Track are mixed in with crowd-pleasing samples – such as Ruff Sqwad’s Functions on the Low, the Streets’ Turn the Page, and Tessela’s own Hackney Parrot – and smooth transitions are made between them all; soon even those in the seating area stand up and move in a hemmed-in two-step.

Get more Overmono tour information here

Continue reading...
by Aneesa Ahmed via Electronic music | The Guardian

Women, life, freedom! Iranian electronic musicians reflect on a year of protest

A new compilation of work by female producers honours the women fighting for their rights in Iran in the wake of Mahsa Zhina Amini’s death in police custody

In September 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini died after being arrested by Iran’s “morality police”, for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Authorities claimed she had a heart attack and brain seizure, but witnesses to her arrest said she was a victim of police brutality. The uprising sparked by her death was the largest Iranian civil rights movement since the revolution in 1979, as thousands took the streets and were often met with violent subjugation from the country’s authorities.

More than a year has now passed, and the ubiquitous chants of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (meaning “woman, life, freedom” in Persian) have seeped from the streets of Iran into the works of female Iranian electronic artists – literally so in the case of Azadi.MP3, whose track Empty Platform is filled with chants of those protests alongside heavily percussive beats.

Continue reading...
by Christina Hazboun via Electronic music | The Guardian

Emma Anderson: Pearlies review – intriguing and subtle reinvention

(Sonic Cathedral)
The Lush singer’s first solo album is a hypnotic, electro-pop slow-burner

During the 1990s, Lush were prominent figures in first shoegaze and later Britpop, but never quite converted critical acclaim into massive commercial success. After a reunion fizzled out in 2016, co-frontwoman (alongside Miki Berenyi) Emma Anderson carried on working on some of the songs that she had planned to share and develop with her bandmates. The result is her debut solo album.

However, whereas Anderson’s work in Lush – and, indeed, her later Sing-Sing project – was very much guitar-centred, Pearlies is firmly rooted in electronic pop (although Suede’s Richard Oakes does contribute guitar on four tracks). It makes for an intriguing listen: her songwriting style is clearly recognisable, but thanks in part to producer James Chapman, the execution sounds more like Goldfrapp at their most dreamlike. It’s not an immediate listen, but the subtle melodies that abound in the likes of Bend the Round, the hypnotic Clusters and the more folk-inflected Willow and Mallow work their magic on repeated plays. It’s a successful enough reinvention for Anderson surely to be wondering why she didn’t make a solo record sooner.

Continue reading...
by Phil Mongredien via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lost Girls: Selvutsletter review – flashes of brilliance from Jenny Hval

(Smalltown Supersound)
The Norwegian musician’s second album with guitarist-husband Håvard Volden is a digressive affair illuminated by some glorious moments

Norwegian experimentalist Jenny Hval and her husband-guitarist, Håvard Volden, are Lost Girls, named after Alan Moore’s infamously indecorous 90s porno-graphic novel. Although the sexual exploits of Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from Oz and Peter Pan’s Wendy are thankfully absent here, Hval’s thoughts, as ever, centre on creativity, femininity and art. Lost Girls’ debut, Menneskekollektivet (Norwegian for “human collective”), married electronic dance textures to Hval’s musings on the dialogue between creator and consumer. Selvutsletter (“self-destruct”) has more familiar song structures but sustains a bracingly adventurous mood.

Gothic, brooding Ruins is superb, a fabulously austere confection, its pendulous bass shivering under icy drums as Hval’s gorgeous voice glides over all. Otherwise, the duo too often arrange a confrontation between singer and song rather than the collusion this seemingly semi-improvised music requires. It’s the more conventional songs that appeal, such as June 1996’s nostalgic, pastoral indie or the cute harmonies and tasty guitar propelling With the Other Hand. While technically accomplished, Selvutsletter doesn’t do enough with its occasional moments of wonder – the glorious chorus of Hvals that arise during Sea White, for one – to justify its many lengthy, meandering sections.

Continue reading...
by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: Underscores

The US dubstep-pop-punk artist has supported 100 Gecs, and on her second album brings to life a fictional Michigan town…

Underscores has a very gen-Z disregard for genre boundaries: her experimental sound fuses dubstep, left-field electronica, rock and much more. Born in San Francisco in 2000, April Harper Grey was influenced by artists such as Skrillex, and started putting music on SoundCloud aged 13. She released her first single two years later: Mild Season, an accomplished instrumental with broken beats and low drops, pulled together with a steady two-step rhythm.

Next she started layering vocals over her music, producing mesmerising, multifaceted soundscapes. Her 2021 debut album, Fishmonger, expanded into more affecting, personal territory and attracted the attention of famous fans such as Blink-182’s Travis Barker. Later that year, Grey toured with hyperpop duo 100 Gecs; her first headline tour followed in 2022.

Wallsocket is out now on Mom+Pop Music. Underscores tours the UK, 30 November-4 December

Continue reading...
by Aneesa Ahmed via Electronic music | The Guardian

The Chemical Brothers: ‘We played on top of a toilet block with sequencers on the loo’

As they head out on tour and publish a visual memoir, the dance duo answer your questions on their greatest gig, courting Kate Bush and Bob Dylan, and dismaying Björk with slap bass

You’ve collaborated with loads of great artists – who’s the one that got away? ShermanMLight
Tom Rowlands: “One that got away” implies that it was feasible, but I did have Kate Bush on the phone. I sent a track, she was very sweet and said: “It’s a nice idea, but you’re alright on your own. It’s fine as it is.” But you’ve got to aim high, haven’t you?

Ed Simons: We are both massive Bob Dylan fans and after one long-running conversation, we thought: “Why not ask Bob Dylan?” It got far enough that we were asked to write to him, so maybe he liked the idea. I’m not sure we ever wrote the letter.

Continue reading...
by As told to Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sampha: Lahai review – how to make an existential crisis sound sublime

(Young)
Six years after the Mercury prize-winning Process, Sampha Sisay’s follow-up is jittery with anxiety and indecision, yet poised and luscious

In 2017, Sampha Sisay released his debut album Process. A troubled, sometimes harrowing, frequently beautiful response to his mother’s death, it was rapturously reviewed and a Top 10 hit. It wound up high in critics’ year-end polls, occasioned nominations at the Brit awards and the Ivor Novellos, and won the Mercury prize. There was the sense that an artist who had previously lurked in the background – albeit the background of some of the biggest albums of recent years, by Beyoncé, Drake, Kanye West and Frank Ocean – was finally coming to the fore.

But Sisay retreated into the background once more, although his mobile still clearly buzzed with A-list requests. He turned up duetting with Alicia Keys on her 2020 album Alicia, earned a Grammy nomination for his brief appearance on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morale and the Big Steppers and had an entire track, Sampha’s Plea, devoted to him on Stormzy’s This Is What I Mean. The latter was a rare moment when Sisay took the limelight: the overall impression was of someone who had taken a look at centre-stage success, decided it wasn’t for him and headed back behind the scenes.

Continue reading...
by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 20 greatest concert films – ranked!

As Taylor Swift’s Eras tour reaches cinemas, with Beyoncé’s Renaissance following soon, we pick the films that best converted the live experience to the screen

The only commercial release of A One Man Show is a wasted opportunity, padding out six live tracks with four (admittedly fantastic) Grace Jones videos. But the live stuff is so fantastic – dramatically lit, beautifully staged, Jones snarling and imperious – it’s unmissable: it’s time someone released the whole gig.

Continue reading...
by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Post your questions for the Chemical Brothers

The dance duo are publishing a coffee table book and touring the UK and Ireland. They will answer your questions before they head off – post them in the comments below

Still block rockin’ after more than 30 years, the Chemical Brothers are currently in one of their busiest ever phases: they have just released a new album, a coffee table book is being published this month and their latest tour is about to begin. To mark it all, they will answer your questions on anything about their long career – post them in the comments below.

The duo of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands met in Manchester in 1989 as the rave scene was cresting, and began DJing in a sweet spot between hip-hop and dance music. Initially named the Dust Brothers, they began producing their own tracks which chewed up those genres and spat them out in grimy, heavy-hitting, acid-splashed breakbeat and loping, psychedelic trip-hop, beginning with Song of the Siren in 1992.

Continue reading...
by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Maple Glider, Quan, Logic1000: Australia’s best new music for October

Each month our critics pick 20 new songs for our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

For fans of: Lana Del Rey, Cat Power, Mazzy Star

Continue reading...
by Janine Israel, Isabella Trimboli, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Andrew Stafford and Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘The catwalk is our riot’: How Paris’s booming ballroom scene found its home in the city of lights

Ballroom, first established by the New York Black and Latin drag community, has taken a firm hold in the French capital – and within it, a thriving, caring culture is flourishing

The most fabulous catwalks in the French capital during Paris fashion week were not on the runways of Vuitton, Dior, or Valentino, but inside the Élysée Montmartre, a venue better known for packed, sweaty rock shows than for high-glamour events. At Sunday’s ELB ball, hundreds walked the Élysée’s floors at Paris’ largest LGBTQ+ ballroom to date, travelling from across the world to compete for 55 trophies and cash prizes.

Inspired by the GMHC Latex ​​Ball in New York, the oldest and largest international Ball founded to celebrate queer lives and honour those lost to Aids-related illnesses, the ELB was established to celebrate Paris’ vibrant LGBTQ+ ballroom community. “This is the first time we have a ball of this magnitude, in this venue, with this much cash prize,” says Parisian house DJ Kiddy Smile, who created and produced the event.

Continue reading...
by Charis McGowan via Electronic music | The Guardian